SA wins lion’s share of Super-Telescope

The Square Kilometre Array telescope, designed to probe deep space, will have its strongest transmitters in SA.

The Square Kilometre Array radio telescope’s fate was finally decided this weekend, with the majority of the transmitters being sited in South Africa, to the joy of the scientists leading the South African bid.

“I am ecstatic; I am happy for our scientists, our country and for Africa. We have done it!” Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor told a media briefing in Pretoria. “It would have been good if we got all of it, but getting three quarters is good enough.”

Representatives from Canada, China, Italy the UK and the Netherlands decided the rights for the $2.4 million project on Saturday. The main bidders, Australia, with a contribution of around $55 million by New Zealand, and South Africa, will each have a share, but with the highest frequency transmitters in South Africa.

“After nine years of work by the South African and Australian SKA site bid teams, the independent SKA Site Advisory Committee, composed of world-renowned experts, carried out an objective technical and scientific assessment of the sites in South Africa and Australia, and identified by consensus Africa as the preferred site,” the minister said.

It seems the decision to share the site was reached based on the fact that both countries had already heavily invested in the project, and so neither should walk away empty-handed.

The majority of the dishes will be built in South Africa, with a series of antennas and lower frequency transmitters in New Zealand and Australia. These will be built over two phases, the first being to add some dishes to the Australian site.

The radio telescope will be used to explore deep space by bouncing signals off of the atmosphere, and also be able to track shifts in climate and tectonic plates. Australian facilities will use their lower frequencies to take larger scale images, while South Africa’s facilities will be responsible for zooming in on, and taking a detailed look at, objects of interest discovered in the mapping process.

It was said that the committee favoured South Africa because of its proximity to the EU, allowing more control over the project. Although the larger part of the telescope will be in South Africa, experts are as yet unsure of the effectiveness of a split array of radio transmitters. Australian Nobel Prize winning astronomer Professor Brian Schmidt argued for more flexibility in the continuation of the project in favour of the project base Australia already has, stating, “The extra cost of doing it compared to putting it in South Africa is almost nothing.”

However ABC reported that Professor Peter Quinn, director of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, is less worried about the cost of having a split site. The siting is similar to that of the European Southern Observatory, which has sites in Chile and operations run from Munich.

Professor Bryan Gaensler of the University of Sydney said the decision was a smart move, combining diplomacy with the chance for greater investment in the future. “As a scientist it’s not which country gets bragging rights but that we get a telescope that does what it was designed to do.”

This 1.5 million euro programme is scheduled to commence in 2016 and will involve building an array of individual antenna synthesised to create a diameter of up to several thousand kilometres.

The plan for the South African bid is to base the majority of SKA in Carnavon, in the Northern Cape, with other antenna in various locations including Madagascar, Namibia and Botswana, among others.